Author: manuscrypts

  • Azadi

    Arundhati Roy

    As always, I must admit a bias for Arundhati Roy. For being an author who has consistently been vocal about rampant capitalistic greed, class prejudices, and more recently, the conversion of India from a democracy to a fascist state. And in doing all this, she holds an uncompromising mirror to those of us whose privilege affords us the luxury of living in bubbles whose walls are impermeable. For now. 

    The book has 9 essays that contain the above, and also touch upon the role of fiction in imagining, processing, and communicating it. Lal Salaam Aleikum, says Anjum, in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. The book has recurring themes – Kashmir, NRC, CAA, RSS – but I think repeating them is worthwhile, so that the gravity is understood. 

    Kashmir, whose special status, or limited autonomy, granted under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, was revoked on 5th August by the Indian government. Followed by Narendra Modi appearing on television on 8th August to announce a lockdown of 7 million people so that they could enjoy Indian democracy and progress while living under military occupation. Google Trends surges showed a repeat of plunder patterns from history – “marry a Kashmiri girl” and “buy land in Kashmir”. Women and land. But that’s only the larger population. The nation has higher ambitions. For instance, access to rivers and other natural resources. And so does the ruling party – “One Nation. One Constitution”. Enforced not just with the might of the state machinery, but the 600000 members of the RSS. 

    NRC, the seeds of which were sown in 1837 when the British made Bengali Assam’s official language. Though revoked in the 1870s, it set the stage. In the late 1890’s the British encouraged Bengali Muslims to become workers in the tea plantations, causing an influx that was first met with affection by the natives, but soon turned to discord. Borders were redrawn regularly, and 1947 and 1971 caused a further inflow of populations, and after decades of violence and antagonism, we now have the NRC, whose updated list was published on 31 August 2019. With 1.9 million missing. It didn’t really make the rulers happy because almost half of them are non-Muslims. Predictably, Justice Gogoi ordered the transfer of the chief co-ordinator of NRC, giving no reasons. 

    And then there is the Citizenship Amendment Bill, passed on 11 Dec 2019 as the CAA. Students of Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia University reacted first. Shaheen Bagh followed. The larger agenda of both NRC and CAA – controlling citizenship. After all, as Hannah Arendt said, “Citizenship is the right to have rights.” And what we are seeing is the systematic disenfranchisement of Muslims and making them second class citizens. 

    All of the essays lay out how the RSS and BJP keep things on boil at all times- NRC, Pakistani Jihadis, Kashmiri terrorists, Bangladeshi ‘infiltrators”, Ram temple, and always, Muslims. Ready to be poured gasoline on, and lit. And backed by a propaganda team – from Bollywood A-listers to sportspersons to media. All components of the fascism playbook, and the regime has the checklist – strong man, ideological army, Aryan superiority, dehumanising of the “internal enemy” and mob justice (113 deaths by mob violence since 2015 – The Quint), propaganda machine, the attacks on academia and assassinations when required, the coteries of businessmen and film stars.

    And the systematic takeover of democratic institutions, as the police get communalised, judiciary abdicate their duty, and the media just want to be lapdogs. Case in point -“Desh ke gaddaron ko, Goli maaro saalon ko”, said Kapil Mishra, who is back in the streets after a very brief interlude. Meanwhile, Justice Muralidhar who was furious with the Delhi Police for not taking action against Mishra, got midnight orders to move to his new assignment in the Punjab High Court. 

    The pandemic is an opportunity to set many things right. But it doesn’t seem to be going in that direction. For instance, the early days saw vast populations being forced back to their villages and small towns just so they could have some dignity. A reminder of the days of partition – class being the driver instead of religion. 

    There is a high likelihood that reading this book and reviewing it will soon be deemed anti-national. As a college lecturer pointed out to Arundhati Roy, among the items recovered from alleged couriers for the Maoists were books she had written. “They’re laying a trail – building a case against you.” Meanwhile, with plans for Nepal and Sri Lanka, the RSS seems to be seeking its version of the German Lebensraum (living space), which the Nazis used to formulate their Generalplan Ost policy – genocide, ethnic cleansing, and colonisation of Central and Eastern Europe . The world can pay heed now, or pay the price again for letting a fascist regime pursue its will. The voices in Kashmir and against NRC and CAA is the same – Azadi. And as Kanhaiya Kumar stated, not from India, but in India.

  • The constraints on freedom

    The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber & David Wengrow was in my long list of favourite reads in 2021. It would have been in the top 10 if it weren’t for my Arundhati Roy bias, because it gave me at least a couple of fundamental perspective shifts.

    The first is at an information level. The book is primarily a rebuttal of what now looks like a simplistic and linear way of looking at human history. The two Davids go up against the Goliath of the contemporary civilisation narrative that comes out in practically every book that even briefly touches upon the evolution of our species. This popular narrative can be (simplistically) summarised by three of my favourite books – Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and the two-part Political Order series by Francis Fukuyama. We were foragers until wheat domesticated us (as Harari would say), which led to societal hierarchies as we now see it. To massively paraphrase Fukuyama’s books, from various kinds of states (governance styles), we then evolved into preferring liberal democracy through the interplay of the state, rule of law, accountable government and social mobilisation, idea legitimacy, and economic development. Both Harari and Fukuyama have been instrumental in helping me understand what we could call ‘the system of the world’. (borrowed from a Neal Stephenson trilogy).

    But in this book, Graeber and Wengrow use archaeological evidence to show how these broad strokes don’t do justice to the experiments and trade-offs that many societies played with in farming, property, democracy and thus civilisation as we know it. It is far more nuanced, and in doing that, bring up the freedom that our ancestors had.

    Which brings me to the second shift. This insight, while was stated in a broad human context, also hit close to home. Has civilisation, they ask, caused us to lose what they see as our three basic freedoms – the freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements? It’s something to ponder over at a personal level. Liberal democracies might tom-tom freedom as a non-negotiable and enshrine it in their constitution, but ‘civil society’ and its economics would probably crumble if we actually had these freedoms. As I tweeted, The book made me realise even more that the freedom the individual needs and the structure that society wants will always be at odds. The differences are of degree not of kind.

    It’s when I think about it that I realise how much we have normalised the loss of these freedoms at a societal and an individual level. Why is anyone obliged to obey anyone else? I realise I’d be ok with an answer that has some emotion as the primary reason, but the most likely answer is power – physical or monetary. Between state and corporations, a duopoly exists on this. But the tyranny is rampant in daily lives too. House help, people being turned away from public parks, expectations of service staff everywhere. The list can go on.

    Why can’t we simply go anywhere else? Beyond money, the lines that we have drawn on paper get translated into checkposts and immigration counters, and crossing them is now a privilege. The lines aren’t natural, but try crossing them without the necessary paperwork. And even if you manage somehow, you will live in constant fear of being thrown out. It’s not that easy to go someplace else.

    Between these two losses, the freedom to change one’s social arrangements is pretty much taken out of play. Who one is (identity) and what one does and where, are very difficult to change. Wake up, go to work, get paid, use the money to add to cart, travel, entertainment. Rinse, repeat. Yes, we all have choices, but society’s choice architecture also bias our decision-making.

    How the hell did basic freedoms become a privilege? How did the ‘civil society’ we traded it for go rogue and become tyrannical? I hope to get a better understanding through the books I read this year. How does this manifest in my own life, and what can I do to help myself and at least a few others become a little more free? That’s a life’s work, and a different post!

  • Metaphors we live by

    George Lakoff, Mark Johnson

    In “How Emotions are Made“, Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote how concepts, goals, words all help the brain frame any new stimulus it receives and that by reframing concepts and looking at them more objectively, we can reshape what emotions are surfaced, and thus exercise free will. But how does one go about that? In the vast scope of “Metaphors we live by”, we get an answer to that too. 

    Metaphorical concepts are so ubiquitous in our thoughts and deeds that we don’t even realise they exist, let alone their effect on how we think about everything from business and ethics to marriage and poetry. Conceptual metaphors allow us to use the inferences in domains we can sense (space, objects etc) on other domains of subjective judgment. In a way, this is how we are able to transmit ideas and create a shared understanding. We often ascribe this to language, but it actually begins with metaphorical concepts.

    The light bulb goes off in the first few pages, when the authors use “Argument is war” as an example. It’s because war is the metaphor we have used at a concept level, that the words we used to describe it are about winning/losing it, or “your claims are indefensible” or ‘He demolished my arguments” or “I attacked his weak points” and so on. Another example to think of is “time is money” – you use spend/save/run out of/invest to describe time. 

    In addition to the structural metaphors above, there are oriental metaphors, which provide a spatial orientation, and are based on our physical and cultural experiences. For instance, happy (spirits rose), consciousness (woke up), control (top of the situation), more (numbers went up), future events (what’s up), good things (looking up), virtue (high standards) are all “up”, while their opposites are down. 

    A thing to note is that a concept can have multiple metaphors e.g. Ideas are food (half- baked), people (father of modern physics), plants (fertile imagination) and many more. Another interesting part is the grounding of concepts. For instance, how we conceptualise the non-physical in terms of the physical. Harry is in the kitchen (which is spatial), in the army (social), in love (emotional). 

    The book further talks about the structuring of our experiences – experiential gestalts, as well as coherence of metaphors (including overlaps of metaphors, how they affect form, and how they can ultimately create realities. It also gets into very interesting territories – the nature of truth, objectivism and subjectivism. It points out how both miss the part that we understand the world through our interactions with it, and proposes an Experientialist alternative. 

    Since I started reading the book, I have been watching the words I use (” I am running late”, “I don’t think we should spend more time on this”) and imagining different metaphors. Because by changing the metaphors we live by, we can change our everyday life, and our future. This is far from an easy read, but even (more than) 40 years after it was first published, it is still pathbreaking.

  • The Tyranny of Merit

    Michael J. Sandel

    If I go by my blog posts, it was in 2004 that the thought first occurred to me – “humankind protests against all kinds of disparities – race, sex, age etc..but aren’t institutions like IIMs promoting discrimination based on intellectual aptitude“. I did not know the word meritocracy then (coined by Michael Young in 1958, who saw it as a dystopian concept), but since 2015, the word and the world it has created has been appearing in many of my posts. That’s why this was a book I was looking forward to. And it didn’t disappoint. Despite an American context, it peels the layers, and the insights are universal. 

    Meritocracy began as a remedy, and its earliest proponents probably understood that while it may not be able to bring about equality, it could help create mobility across the levels of society. Unfortunately, it has increasingly moved away from that purpose too, and has now created a system where those are already privileged have a disproportionate advantage over those who do not. And no, education, especially the way it is now, is not a solution. And anyway, mobility can no longer compensate for inequality. Meritocracy was a means to an end, but I can’t help but think that its progress is mirroring that of a related “inter-subjective” concept – money, which is now an end in itself. 

    The author begins with the recent success of populist movements – Trump, Brexit – some of which are a threat to democracy, and provides his perspectives on why they were able to rally people. The answers lie beyond the usual suspects – backlash against racial, ethnic, gender diversity, and the dislocation caused by globalisation. In short, a technocratic way of conceiving public good, and meritocratic way of defining winners and losers. The former removes moral arguments from public discourse and treats them as matters of economic efficiency. The technocratic version of meritocracy de-links merit and moral judgment, by defining the the common good only in economic terms, and equating it to GDP. The latter creates hubris among the winners by deeply embedding the thought that their success is all their own doing without luck or privilege playing any part, and humiliation and resentment among the losers, by making it seem that their status is purely their fault. The author does an excellent job of highlighting this change through the American political rhetoric, and the “you deserve it” narrative in everyday life. 

    For the longest while, education was the ticket to the “American Dream”, but this has created damage on multiple counts. It has eroded the self esteem of those who have not gone to college, devaluing their contributions, and making it seem the sole reason for their lot in life. It has also promoted credentialism, the “last acceptable prejudice”, making a college degree a pre-condition for dignified work. “Smart vs dumb” began to replace “just vs unjust” and “right vs wrong” in public discourse and policy. Democratic institutions too became the exclusive preserve of the credentialed class (in the West) making it less representative. The author shows how the support base of various parties have changed over decades, alienating the working class and adding to polarisation. 

    There is a fantastic section on whether we deserve our talents, or are responsible for the value that society happens to place on them. While he acknowledges the effort involved in success, there really is no question on the importance of talent in the overall equation. Another part that really proved to me how I was conditioned to accept meritocracy was the exploration of free-market liberalism and welfare state liberalism’s alternatives to meritocracy. In the first, the author quotes Friedrich A Hayek, when pointing out that “Market outcomes have nothing to do with rewarding merit. Merit involves a moral judgement about what people deserve, whereas value is simply a measure of what consumers are willing to pay for the goods and services sellers have to offer“. In the second, he quotes John Rawls, “If people competed on a truly level playing field, the winners would be those endowed with the greatest talent. But differences of talent are morally arbitrary as differences of class“. Later in “Success Ethics”, he uses Frank Knight’s “..meeting market demand is not necessarily the same thing as making a truly valuable contribution to society.” Also useful was the nuance between deserving and entitled, and the rabbit hole of moral thinking it opens up. The author also provides recommendations on how we can attempt to fix this tyranny – in the domains of education and economics. 

    Why is all this important? Technology is making more and more jobs extinct, and my generation is already feeling the pain. Beyond the economic aspects, work also makes huge contributions to meaning, dignity, and does its share of removing our fear of becoming obsolete and irrelevant. Contributive justice, as opposed to the distributive justice that both sides of the political spectrum are attempting to achieve. To quote R.H.Tawney, “Social well-being… depends upon cohesion and solidarity…Individual happiness does not only require that men should be free to rise to new positions of comfort and distinctions; it also requires that they should be able to lead a life of dignity and culture, whether they rise or not.” By promoting meritocracy and free-market evaluations of our contributions, we are increasingly removing that agency from a human’s life.

  • Reflections on my OS – Part 1

    Alternately: Internal Pattern Recognition: IPR? 😉

    If there’s one thing that Stoicism has taught me, it is that the good fight is not with the world, but yourself. Many of the books I read and observations I try to make on family are to get a better understanding of the ‘why’ behind my thinking. Among the many things that “Behave” gave me insights on was this, and an explanation for how siblings can be very different in terms of mindset and behaviour, despite inheriting not just ‘nature’ but sharing ‘nurture’ too.

    ‘Another dogma was that brains are pretty much wired up early in childhood – after all, by age two, brains are already about 85% of adult volume, but the development trajectory is much slower than that. …the final brain region to fully mature (in terms of synapse number, myelination, and metabolism) is the frontal cortex, not going fully online until the mid twenties.‘

    “…the brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes.” 

    (more…)